Killer_Tofu’s Techdirt Profile

About Killer_Tofu

from the crispy-fried-favorites dept

This week's favorites post comes from Killer_Tofu whose name intrigues me, but I'm not sure I really want to know.

This week I have been given the honor of sharing my favorite posts with my fellow Techdirt readers. The TD gang thought it nice to allow me to do this... and they didn't even charge me! Talk about a lost opportunity because I would have paid about a whole... I don't know... five or so dollars to be able to get this posted. How could they possibly get any benefit from allowing me to do this? Its almost like I am stealing something because they didn't make me pay them. (I am just joking, as all of us regular readers know, it is a great way to include the community and to CwF.)

Okay, before I start with my favorite posts, I want to mention that a lot of my views are shaped by what I feel is best for the human population as a whole. What would help the most people. Being a techie and reading TD, one of the things I see holding a lot of us back is patents. For now, patents seem to get in the way of a lot of innovation and to be a non-stop drain of money from the system. All the money that should be put into innovating is shifted around from company to company with some always being siphoned off by lawyers. That is why I found it great to hear that both The Guardian and The Washington Post had rather great articles about how broken the patent system is today. A little bit of icing on the cake from the Washington Post article was that it was written by Steven Pearlstein, who we were told is read by those in Congress. Hopefully they listen. If those two weren't enough, to follow it up during the same week we had The Wall Street Journal also adding a great piece as to why patents are not all they are supposed to be.

Moving on from patents we had a fair few good lawsuit outcomes this week. We had a couple of good instances of bad lawsuits being dropped. There was one for The Expendables, where it was another case of "sue every IP address we can find on the internet." They ended up dropping the lawsuit entirely. And Poor Righthaven. About the only lawsuit that could be considered anywhere near good for them was dismissed due to a lack of standing. I do have to give them kudos for their persistence. Even if they went about... well, everything, the wrong way (including the idea behind their lawsuits). There was the absolutely wonderful and great to read article about a federal court defying the other federal courts, saying that law enforcement needs a warrant and probable cause to get your location data. I hope that another court or two will lean this way and then get the idea up to the Supreme Court and they will rule in favor of our 4th amendment (saying a warrant is indeed necessary). As if that ruling wasn't good enough (and really, we can never get enough good rulings) we have the MP3Tunes ruling that went the way of the greater good. Here EMI failed in their lawsuit and the DMCA safe harbors came through right where they should have. Reading through that article also presented us with the gem that the DMCA applies to pre-1972 recordings as well.

Another great topic I find uplifting is when large corporations get called on their lies. I will start off this section with yet another article on EMI. In this case, they were caught screwing an artist. I don't see how this could be considered anything other than lying, with as many times as their story changed. As if their mistakes weren't enough, they ended the conversation with Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe by telling him that he should feel lucky they will give him royalties from here on out. How insulting of them. Why would anyone believe the major labels or the RIAA have the artist's interests are heart at this point? Next we have AT&T's accidental disclosure that they lied about why they need T-Mobile. I was almost shocked to find that the FCC is actually going to question them about this. It almost feels kind of sad when one of the government areas does what you would think they should do for the people and you are pleasantly surprised.

For the last section I have some miscellaneous posts that I enjoyed. First off there was the individual giving away lemonade for free. The man in charge of the farmer's market going on around him threatened him, assaulted him (tried to take the camera right out of our protagonists hands) and finally called the cops on him. It almost feels like civil disobedience for standing up for giving away lemonade, except for the fact that it is perfectly legal (just as legal as his recording of all of the events). I am curious if the cops can get in trouble for arresting you for something they know is legal though (reference the cop saying "we won't arrest you today"). Next there was the news that the messengers were right about Fox delaying the release of its shows online. Sure as rain the copyright infringement rates went up for their shows the instant they delayed them. It is almost like the only ones who didn't see that coming were Fox themselves and the MPAA (who had the nasty slam article trying to shoot the messengers pointing out what would happen).

But, but, without stronger copyright protections, how is Congress going to encourage Frankie to continue creating? Surely if the incentives were just a little bit more, and a little more crazy, certainly he wouldn't have died yet.

After a bunch of the points raised here, I don't think I will be getting this offer. While it seemed great at first, it definitely comes across as a too good to be true. I really want to sign up for a solid personal VPN, but have a hard time making sure that what I am signing up for is great.

No, I had asked them about changing devices in case a computer dies or something. You are allowed to delete a device per week. The guy who emailed me the response to my questions was Yuriy Popov (Simplex Solutions Inc.).

Actually no, its not. While we don't know how long this service will last, the 40$ offer has been around since the store launched last week. I don't know when the offer will truly expire since when it launched it said 2 days left, and after the expired came back for another week. 40$ is low enough though that I am picking this up this evening. Even if I get just one year out of it, it will be worth it.

Two things to mention though from my questions with the company. They do not retain any logs related to specific traffic carried (or so they told me). Also, they are owned by a US based company.

What is somebody made a license plate cover that restricts viewing of the license plate. You know how there are the monitor privacy screens so you can only see your monitor from a mostly directly in front of position? What is somebody used those types of screens to make it so license plates could only be read from ground level? That way anything up higher aimed down would have a very hard time reading the plate. Does something like this exist already?

I know I don't post much on TD compared to my days of years past, but I do still at least read every post title and a good half of the posts. I am enjoying the podcast so far. Thank you guys for doing it. This one particularly was enlightening as to how both services work and how far they've come. Being where I am at in Michigan I don't think I have ever seen the mustaches or other signatures in person. Although, as stated in the podcast that doesn't mean as much these days.

So, now the cops are concerned about privacy. And they are talking about what goes on in their cars and while they are out in public? Why are cops and organizations like them pushing for so much surveillance then huh? The exceptions to the bills should not have been allowed until at least all license plate scanners and similar tracking had been completely halted. They are pretty clearly just trying to maintain their system of cops being above the law, and everyone else gets to be monitored. Despicable.

The sexual assailants. They probably are pretty interested in keeping all of their names under wraps since they assaulted her when she was not in a capacity to resist or give proper consent. I am not going to judge one way or the other how that poor girl ended up so drunk, whether it was her fault or whether they technically drugged her. Either way that took place, those boys had no right whatsoever to do what they did.

They probably have a very large interest in keeping the names hidden though. They got away with rape and don't want their names associated with the heinous act they committed.

I use Podcast Addict on Android. Contains most of the great features that were mentioned about most apps. I am not sure about syncing between devices and I only fast forward at 1.6x speed so far so I am not sure about anything over 2.

It is the second app I tried for podcasts and since I only use on phone while in car so far, it has sufficed nicely.

After the Awesome Stuff article from TD related to podcasts, I finally got a podcast app (on android, settled for Podcast Addict for now, which feels pretty good actually) and so far have subscribed to This American Life and Fresh Air. One of the Fresh Air podcasts was an interview with Risen and related to his book Pay Any Price and he was talking about confidential sources and how the federal government has been harassing him for these years over it. I agree with him that he should not have to talk about his sources, period. That is journalism and out congress really needs to get around to passing the federal shield law so that the feds can't harass people like Risen anymore.

seems immensely worrisome if you believe in an open internet or basic principles of innovation.

Since they target entire websites and not just specific content (also wrongly) we could continue that sentence with a few items.or freedom of speech.or artists right's. (the industry has taken down music that artists wanted shared before)or due process.

There are others of course, but there are tons of reasons not to let a few asshats with a proven track record of abuse and disregard for others to have power over anything at all, let alone sites on the internet.

Funny short story to add (didn't want previous post to get too long .. even though its pretty long). I wore my TechDirt T-Shirt to a class I took at Oakland University (in Michigan) for the first day of an Intellectual Property class that I took (an elective in my general area). The professor got quite a kick out of the shirt, and apparently he follows TD too. He was teaching people about a view very similar to TD since most students that went through the school didn't know how much there was to copyright. A lot of people view it as horrible now, but somehow necessary. He helped expose them to more of the remix culture, a lot of fair use (which some people only have a minor grasp on), and also to more of the abuses that go on regularly (aside from the obvious ones like Youtube takedowns).

It was a really fun class and the professor was great. A lot of people left that class with a much broader view.

I have been reading TechDirt articles for the last nine to ten years total now (its been a long time but I can't remember exactly when I first found it). At first I was younger and much angrier at things that happened before I realized more how things seem to flow on the national level. So, after the first couple years I changed my handle to KillerTofu. I have been around using this handle for just over 7 years now and my posts have usually been a lot less angry than how I posted before.

I come to TechDirt because I feel it is an easy to reach source that encourages readers and discussions around topics and has a good collection of topics covered that I am passionate about and feel need more attention drawn to them. I tend to link to these articles when I am discussing a topic with somebody and the article was my source and it can add detail beyond what we discussed. You guys do have a very well thought out argument and while I can make most of the same points, I tend to feel I don't quite do it as well as you guys do. As such I will sometimes link people to articles written here anyways. Even if I haven't raised a discussion, if the post covers anything that I know a friend is passionate about, I will link them to it as additional news for them to cover. I know two of my friends who regularly scan the headlines here now because of that even though they don't read much.

Over the last two to three years I have posted a lot less in the comments than I used to as well. This is partially due to time restraints. I also enter a lot of articles with intent to post something, but will see that somebody said my exact thought or noticed what I noticed, and then I won't post. It was already posted and I don't want to just add a "me too!".

I used to read every single article as well during some slow times at work but over the last four years I started following more online and now I tend to skip some articles if I feel that from the title I already know what it will say. After following for so long, I have a general feel for how responses to certain items will be and not every topic covered greatly interests me (although all topics interest me at least some). The topics that greatly interest me I still read every article sooner or later for.

There was an era where I tried to shoot down the deniers and anti mikes, by replying with logic and analogies and comparisons and reason. That didn't end well for me. I won't say that they won, since there are still others here holding that torch. I did put in my time doing that though and due to having less time these days, I don't partake of that anymore really. Much thanks goes out to my fellow TDers who now make sure that baseless arguments and strawmen are not left standing.

Overall I still love TD, still love my T-shirt I got from here back when (and still wear it). Keep up the good articles guys!

Since the officers seem to be inclined to waste work time, they should be forced to use 1 hour of their work time every day towards the following goal until completed:

Watch through all baywatch scenes containing David Hasselhoff, watch all Arnold Schwarzenegger movies after he was a governor, a twenty four hour Spongebob marathon, the OJ Simpson trial, twelve hours of Glee, four hours of Youtube ads (no actual videos), a nikki minaj cd, and six hours of other music from various "artists" on that list. All of this must be done by streamining the content over a Comcast network to a Windows Vista machine while wearing magnum condoms on their fingers.

If they are bored with work then they can spend more than one hour a day working on this task's completion.